Customer Reviews

The Push Hands Workbook: T'Ai Chi Partner Movements (Tui Shou) For Sport And Personal Development

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It is of course impossible to learn tai chi, much less pushing hands, without a qualified teacher. However, if you're stuck in a place where you have to study on your own, this book is for you. There are other excellent resources on pushing hands which explain the history and theory, and end with a few drills; this one is almost entirely practical. When it introduces key principles and skills (such as sensitivity), it introduces them as something you can experience by doing.

The 50+ exercises are divided into non-competitive practice "drills" emphasizing basic skills, and playful, more free-form and possibly competitive "games."

Each exercise is described about as clearly as complex physical movements can be, specifying the "time frame" for learning, the key skills learned, the basic format, the details, some martial applications & variations, and how you know when you can "graduate". There are enough photos to get the basic body mechanics across. There are also notes indicating where different family styles do things differently, which is very useful to prevent the standard confusion that "we don't do it that way!"

The exercises start with fundamentals, going back to drill the structural principles students should be learning in the hand form, and slowly building towards more advanced skills. One example of this focus on fundamentals is that the standard two-handed "four energies" drill--which most other books start with--isn't introduced until about 2/3s of the way through.

The book is well written--Reynolds comes through as an outstanding and patient teacher. About the only negative comment I have is that it could be laid out better; the current blocks of text with headings make it hard to see quickly where one exercise ends and the next starts. For the next edition, it'd be worth hiring a designer to block out the information so that the workbook can be consulted more easily.

Overall, this is an outstanding resource for serious students in all practice traditions. Thanks, Nando!

I studied Zheng Manqing's 37 posture form with Nando in a class at Southern Oregon University in 1998. He is a gifted taijiquan practitioner, teacher, and a great person.